Blog Stats

Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Student Association for Law and Mind Sciences (SALMS) Speakers Series:

Robert Trivers, Rutgers Biologist and Anthropologist: “Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling others the better to fool ourselves.”

Thursday, 11/3, 12-1 pm, Austin West;

SALMS serves lunch: Free Burritos!

Why do we deceive ourselves so often in our daily lives? Robert Trivers, Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University, argues that self-deception evolved in the service of deceit—the better to fool others. We do it for biological reasons—in order to help us survive and procreate. From viruses mimicking host behavior to humans misremembering (sometimes intentionally) the details of a quarrel, science has proven that the deceptive one can always outwit the masses. But we undertake this deception at our own peril. Trivers will present findings from his new book, “The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life.”

Trivers won the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences in 2007 for his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict, and cooperation. Harvard’s Steven Pinker has described Trivers as an “under-appreciated genius”: “In an astonishing burst of creative brilliance, Trivers wrote a series of papers in the early 1970s that explained each of the five major kinds of human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, acquaintance with acquaintance, and a person with himself or herself. . . . Trivers’ ideas are, if such a thing is possible, even more important than the countless experiments and field studies they kicked off. They belong in the category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications we are only beginning to work out.”

Last week, Phil Zimbardo delivered another remarkable lecture at Harvard Law School — this time tracing his journey from studying evil to inspiring heroism. We hope to post that video in several weeks. For his introduction, Situationist Editor Jon Hanson assembled this short video comparing Professor Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment and Professor Kingsfield’s Harvard Law School (The Paper Chase), both of which reached their 40th anniversary this year.

The American Constitution Society of Harvard Law School are sponsoring a panel discussion with Situationist Contributor Jon Hanson, Duncan Kennedy, and James Hackney. Here’s a description:

Many law students find that law and economics is a pervasive and seductive way of tying legal issues to the real world. But what are its limits? And what other ways are there of thinking about the effects of law on the world? An illustrious group of panelists–James Hackney from Northeastern School of Law; and Duncan Kennedy and Jon Hanson, both from Harvard Law School–will discuss how their work provides alternative ways of thinking about law and our world.

What can primates teach us about the evolutionary bases of rape, murder, and patriarchy? For several decades, Richard Wrangham, the Ruth Moore Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Biological Anthropology at Harvard, has studied primates in the wild. His work on the ecological and behavior comparisons of chimpanzees and humans has been his greatest contribution to the animal behavior literature. His insights into the cultural similarities between humans and chimpanzees–including our unique tendencies to form murderous alliances and engage in recreational sexual activity–has had profound affects on how scientists analyze primate behavior, non-human and human alike.

In addition to his exhaustive peer-reviewed journal publications, as author of Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Chimpanzee Cultures, and as co-editor of Primate Societies, Professor Wrangham’s important observations and theoretical contributions to the field of primate socio-behavior are covered in a variety of works, which range from the textbook to popular science manual. In recent years, Professor Wrangham has been named as a trustee to several important primatological research organizations, including the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, the Jane Goodall Institute and is Chair of the Great Ape World Heritage Species Project.

How should the law confront the “choices” of an addict? Though neuroscience research into addiction has advanced dramatically, few lessons have been incorporated into legal doctrine. Dr. Steven Hyman, former Harvard Provost and founding member of the Governing Board of the Project on Law and Neuroscience, will present recent neuroscience findings to shed light on the legal concepts of addiction and self-control.

After leading the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1996–2001, Dr. Hyman served as Provost of Harvard University from 2001–2011. Prior to his position at NIMH, Dr. Hyman was Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of Psychiatry Research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He also taught neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and was the first faculty Director of Harvard University’s Interfaculty Initiative in Mind, Brain and Behavior. Dr. Hyman received his B.A. from Yale in 1974 (summa cum laude) and his M.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1976, where he was a Mellon fellow studying the history and philosophy of science. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School (cum laude) in 1980. Following an internship in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a residency in psychiatry at McLean Hospital and a clinical fellowship in neurology at MGH, he was postdoctoral fellow at Harvard in molecular biology. Dr. Hyman is currently a scholar in residence in the Psychiatric Disease Program at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Read more at the SALMS website..

Like this:

The Student Association for Law and Mind Sciences (or SALMS) kicks off its fall Speakers Series this upcoming Tuesday, September 13 when Edward P. Schwartz will present his talk: “Facing the Fearful Jury: Terror Management Theory in the Courtroom” in Pound 101 at noon.

As part of our campus remembrance on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, SALMS invited Mr. Schwartz, a nationally recognized jury consultant, to share his insights into the psychology of juries in terrorism trials, with a particular emphasis on the upcoming trial of Tarek Mahenna in Boston federal court. Anyone interested in trial litigation, jury psychology, or the law of terrorism should particularly enjoy Tuesday’s talk. Check out Mr. Schwartz’s blog entry about the talk here and see a full description here.

Come for the talk, for the community, and for the free lunch – by popular demand, SALMS will again serve free Felipe’s burritos this year!

Below, see confirmed speakers, the dates of their talks, and a very brief description (that certainly does not do their exceptional scholarship and topics justice). All listed talks are slated to begin at noon. Stay tuned for updates, locations, and additional speakers!

September 13: Edward P. Schwartz. Tuesday,noon, Pound 101. Schwartz, a nationally recognized jury consultant, will speak about psychology and jury decision-making. The talk will focus on terrorism trials after September 11th, especially the case of Tarek Mahenna, whose trial is scheduled to begin in Boston in October.

September 27: Steven Hyman. Tuesday, noon, Pound 101. Dr. Hyman, the former Provost of Harvard University, is a visiting scholar at the Broad Institute who specializes in molecular neuroscience, molecular biology, and psychiatry. The talk will cover recent advances in law and neuroscience scholarship and preview the future of the field.

October 12: Richard Wrangham. Wednesday, noon, Austin West. Wrangham is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard, where he studies primatology. The talk will consider the evolutionary roots of sexual violence by explaining lessons learned from chimpanzees.

October 28: Robert Trivers. Trivers studies social evolution, the evolution of selfish genetic elements, and deceit as Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. The talk will focus on the evolutionary basis of self-deception and its implications for the law.

November 7: John Jost. Jost, Professor of Psychology at NYU, is known for his work on system justification theory and on the psychological basis of political ideology. The talk will explore the underlying cognitive and motivational differences between liberals and conservatives.

Agenda

Welcome & Introduction by Dean’s Office

Kirk Stark, Vice Dean, UCLA, Law

Implicit Bias and the Courts — Substantive Framing and Introduction

Jerry Kang, Co-Director PULSE, UCLA, Law

1. State of the Science – Implicit Biases / in the Courtroom. This panel will share and present findings from psychology about how biases, including but not limited to implicit biases measured through reaction-time instruments, may influence the courtroom and related judicial institutions. This panel will provide attendees with a state-of-the-art description of the predictive and ecological validities of various bias measures, with careful exposition of which theories, mechanisms, and findings enjoy which sorts of scientific “consensus.”

2. State of the Field — Institutional Responses So Far. This panel will focus on the various ways in which legal institutions, including the judiciary and legal procedures, have responded to the emerging evidence of implicit biases. Judicial educators, judges, and academics will describe and assess what has been done, and to what effect– given various economic, political, and scientific constraints.

3. Possibilities and Complications: Theoretical and Practical, Legal and Scientific. The morning panels will have brought the audience up to speed on the state of the art. This panel pulls back the lens to explore the various theoretical possibilities and practical complications connected to measuring biases, measuring their consequences, and implementing potential debiasing strategies. Both legal and scientific complexities will be addressed.

4. Back to Reality — Roundtable Discussion: Concrete Solutions and Next Steps. The last panel will bring back all the panelists for a final robust, interdisciplinary, and unscripted conversation about the challenges and opportunities highlighted throughout the day. What can and should be done now? What research agenda will provide the knowledge necessary to lessen the impact of implicit bias within the courtroom and the judiciary? What forces, besides the scientific merits, might drive the conversation and debate?

Like this:

The Heroic Imagination Project, directed by Situationist Contributor Phil Zimbardo, is excited to announce that we will be featured on NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday July 4, 2011.

The piece will run during Morning Edition’s weekly “Your Health” segment, and will focus on the idea of teaching Heroism. The program features Dr. Zimbardo and several of the students from ARISE high school.

Please check your local listings to find out when Morning Edition will be airing in your region. Schedules and stations are available here.

Like this:

Marjorie Kelly, Senior Associate at the Tellus Institute, speaks today at Harvard Law School. The event is sponsored by SICKLE (Jon Hanson’s Corporate Law Class),

Title: “What Comes Next? The demise of shareholder primacy and the seeds of new corporate design.”When: Wednesday, April 6, 12:15-1:15 PMWhere: Langdell South

Here’s a bio of Marjorie Kelly:

Marjorie Kelly is a modern revolutionary who wants to democratize economics. She argues that our current economic system is an aristocracy run by corporations that pay shareholders as much as possible and employees as little as possible—while ignoring the public good. CEOs aren’t all bad guys, Kelly says, they’re just operating in a system that forces them to put profits above everything else. That’s what she aims to change with her groundbreaking book, The Divine Right of Capital, which offers ideas on how to move toward a more humane, democratic corporate design.

Kelly’s book is already a modern classic that reveals the mechanisms that lead capitalism to create social ills. She shows how the wealth gap, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are merely symptoms; the real illness is shareholder primacy—the corporate drive to create more wealth for the rich, regardless of the cost. She says that 99 percent of “investing” is speculation benefiting the financial elite, not small investors.

Ordinary citizens can spur change, Kelly says, by pushing for reform on laws that govern the way corporations operate. “We must design a corporate system in which all economic rights are equally protected, not only the rights of shareholders,” Kelly says. To that end, she advocates two key areas of reform: requiring corporations to be responsible to the public good, and putting more wealth into the hands of those who generated it—the employees.

Kelly isn’t a dreamy-eyed idealist. She is the co-founder and editor of Business Ethics, a leading publication on socially responsible business, and a Missouri-born, third-generation entrepreneur (her grandfather started Anderson Tool & Die in his basement during the Depression). David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, calls Kelly “our Thomas Paine for the new millennium.”

Who: Situationist Contributor and Drexel Law School Professor Adam Benforado and University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Geoff Goodwin will discuss historical and empirical research regarding retributive punishment imposed upon animals. They will then use this evidence to draw inferences about human intuitions regarding punishment.

On Tuesday, March 29th, Professor Jon Hanson will give a lecture entitled “Law, Psychology, and Inequality” at 6PM in Harvard Law School’s Austin East. A reception with free food and drink will follow!

Elaine McCardle wrote a terrific review of last month’s Fifth Annual PLMS Conference. Her article is the spotlight piece on the Harvard Law School website and includes several excellent videos, photos, and links. Here’s the story.

* * *

While equality is a fundamental principle of American law and the bedrock of the national psyche, inequality has actually increased in the past four decades in the distribution of wealth, power, opportunity, even health. Yet the topic of inequality has received relatively little attention from legal theorists, and, for the most part, it is ignored in the basic law school curriculum.

A conference last month at HLS, “The Psychology of Inequality,” presented by the Project on Law & Mind Sciences (PLMS), stepped into that vacuum, bringing together scholars, law students, and others to examine inequality from the standpoint of the latest research in social science, health science, and mind science, and to reflect on the implications of their findings for law. The HLS Student Association for Law and Mind Sciences (SALMS), together with a group of roughly 20 students, were instrumental in organizing the conference.

“Inequality matters in ways that are not commonly understood, including in how people see and make sense of the world,” saysJon Hanson, the Alfred Smart Professor of Law and Director of PLMS. “Indeed, the way people respond to instances of inequality – either by equalizing, or by rationalizing – appears to be a very significant factor in how they view markets, regulation, and many important policy and social issues. So when we engage in policy debates, mustering all our best arguments and evidence in favor of a given policy conclusion we shouldn’t be perplexed when our opponent doesn’t budge,” says Hanson. “Such recalcitrance on both sides of a discussion often reflects, not the inadequacy, but the irrelevance, of the reasons being exchanged. Behind it all may be a conflict between largely subconscious urges: some people would rather rationalize inequality while others lean toward equalizing.”

Hanson was one of more than a dozen scholars who spoke at the Feb. 26 conference, the fifth annual conference by PLMS, founded by Hanson six years ago to promote interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration between the mind sciences and the l

egal community. PMLS supports research, writing and conferences in order to dislodge the prevailing “dispositionist” approach of law – which holds that human beings, for the most part, make rational choices based on logical preferences – in favor of a “situationist approach.” Situationsim recognizes that social sciences and mind sciences, including social psychology, social cognition, and cognitive neuroscience, have repeatedly demonstrated that human behavior is influenced by countless factors ignored by the dispositionist approach, which collectively are known as “situation.”

Jaime Napier, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, presented her research on the ways in which high-status and low-status groups differ in their rationalizations of inequality. High-status people tend to place blame on individuals for their lot in life, while low-status people tend to see theirs as the natural order of things. Eric Knowles, an assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, discussed his theory of “malleable ideologies,” through which different groups with a same core ideology – say, “life is sacred” – can come to different outcomes on issues such as abortion or the death penalty. Adam Benforado ’05, a former student of Hanson’s and an assistant professor at the Earl Mach School of Law at Drexel University, presented on the mind-body connection in decision-making, including how seemingly innocuous environmental influences such as room temperature might have significant influence on decisions made by juries and judges. Ichiro Kawachi, a Professor of Social Epidemiology and Chair of the Social/Behavioral Sciences Department at the Harvard School of Public Health, discussed research showing that people of lower social status lead shorter, sicker lives, while other speakers discussed ways that social disparities influence health, how even young children favor high-status individuals, and the drive among humans to view the world as essentially fair.

In addition to national experts in the areas of health, psychology, and mind sciences, a number of HLS faculty contributed to the discussion from their areas of expertise in a panel discussion (see video below), including John Palfrey ’01, the Henry N. Ess III

Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources, an expert on the internet; Lucie White ’81, the Louis A. Horvitz Professor of Law, who specializes in poverty law and international economic and social rights; Robert C. Bordone ’97, the Thaddeus R. Beal Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program; Stella Burch Elias, a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law and Andrew Woods ’07, a Climenko Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in politics at Cambridge University.

In that discussion, Hanson shared some provocative ideas. The good news, he said, is that humans have an egalitarian impulse, so that inequality causes them discomfort; some resolve the conflict by redistributing so that there is more equality, while others rationalize with reasons that explain the inequality. The bad news, Hanson added, is that it’s not terribly hard to move someone away from the equalizing impulse.

“When you experience fear and threat – personal threat, group threat, system threat – you become a hardcore dispositionist,” said Hanson, snapping his fingers, “just like that!”

Question: A mere 15% of board members of companies are women, the European average is 11.7%, in China it is approx. 7% and in Japan it is even lower. What are the reasons for this disparity and what are measures against it? Some countries, notably Norway, have taken the step to mandate gender quotas for boards of companies. Other countries are debating similar laws. Are gender quotas for boards of companies the right tool to address the problem, or do they lead to unintended consequences?

The discussion will address these questions and the underlying sociopsychological issues.

Co-sponsored by the Harvard Association for Law and Business, the HLS Advocates for Human Rights, the HLS Student Association for Law and Mind Sciences, ACLU and the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender.

Like this:

Looking for an opportunity to process and discuss your 1L experience? Curious about what a feminist analysis of the 1L curriculum might offer? Join [Situationist Contributor] Professor Jon Hanson and Lecturer Diane Rosenfeld of HLS and Professor Jenny Wriggins of the University of Maine for a panel on feminist perspectives of the 1L courses.